'They just wanted a scapegoat'

Yesterday, Bobby Waugh - whose Northumberland farm is believed to be the source of last year's foot and mouth crisis - was found guilty of cruelty to animals and of keeping quiet about an outbreak among his livestock. He tells Fran Abrams that he was unlucky

Bobby Waugh is a big man with very broad shoulders, which is fortunate. Since his pig unit at Heddon-on-the-Wall in Northumberland was identified 15 months ago as the possible source of the foot and mouth epidemic, they have had a lot to carry.

Days after the outbreak started, Burnside Farm was headline news. The few-hundred square metre pig unit at the farm was described in the press as "atrocious", "fetid", and "an eyesore". It was widely reported that uncooked swill from Chinese restaurants had given the farm's pigs foot and mouth. A flurry of stories ensued on Britain's illegal trade in suspect Asian meat.

The truth will possibly never be known. Although Waugh was convicted yesterday of cruelty, of failing to notify the authorities of the outbreak and of feeding unprocessed waste to his animals, he was never formally accused of starting last year's national crisis.

In any case, Waugh has had other things on his mind. On the day it was confirmed that his pigs had the disease, his elder brother and business partner Ronnie was admitted to hospital with suspected stomach cancer, for which he has been undergoing treatment ever since. A few months later, Bobby had a heart attack. Then, after being presented with a £30,000 clean-up bill which he could not pay, he was evicted from his premises and his life as a pig farmer was over.

Now Burnside Farm is a bleak place, whose name suggests something far more grandiose than its grimy reality. Where there used to be dilapidated wooden sheds, now there is bare, purged earth on which even the weeds have declined to grow. The corrugated huts where the pigs were kept still stand, but they are stripped bare, mere skeletons of a piggery. An abandoned scrubbing brush, a few disinfectant cannisters and a single rubber glove bear testament to recent events. A battered spoon lies half-buried. Even the smell of pigs has gone.

Waugh does not come here any more. He lives, as he always has, in a terraced house in Sunderland, which he shares with Ronnie and their two sisters, Dorothy and Isabel. None of them has ever married, and the family fiercely guards its privacy - even close friends say they have never been invited to the house. And so we meet in a faceless motel, where Waugh declines a drink and proceeds to describe his catalogue of calamity with little emotion. His hands, which are his most striking feature - huge, hamlike beasts, roughened and lined with thin white scars - remain loose in his lap while he talks.

The only time his shell cracks is when he is asked how he felt when he arrived at Burnside one morning last February to find both the local ministry vet and the press waiting for him. He laughs, a clipped little bark which makes his shoulders heave. "I don't panic easy," he says. If the word "phlegmatic" had not already been in the dictionary, they would have had to invent it for Waugh.

Over the past three weeks, Bedlington magistrates court has heard tales of horror about the state in which Bobby and Ronnie kept their premises. Dead pigs left lying around; uncooked swill left sitting in drums before being fed to the animals. Waugh continued to deny all the accusations.

After all, the Waughs have been pig farmers for more than half a century. As far back as Waugh can remember, pigs were his whole life. He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't have hobbies. Just the pigs. Practically as soon as he could walk, his dad had him cleaning out the pens at the family pig unit, and he never considered any alternative careers.

"Never thought of doing anything else," he says. "You had to work on the farm - you had no choice. Mucking out, everything."

Even before last year, things weren't easy. Bobby and Ronnie had been forced to quit their pig farm at Boldon in Sunderland seven years ago after the council, which owned the land, ordered them to carry out thousands of pounds-worth of improvements. And over the past three years it had been increasingly difficult to make a living. With pig prices dropping, they had been doing less breeding and more work for Cheale Meats in Essex, where the disease was first discovered, buying old sows from other farmers and fattening them up with swill before shipping them off to Germany for sausages.

"For three years, the job has just been desperate," Waugh says. "You sort of run out of money. You had to sell them, but you didn't want to sell because the price was right down. Normally you might have three bad months, but this had been three bad years. A 300 kilo sow before that would be worth £280. At one point it was worth £39." When the knackerman arrived there were just 527 animals at Burnside although its capacity was 1,400.

Waugh reacted to the news of foot and mouth with characteristic calm. Was he concerned, on the morning of Monday February 19, when he had a call from Andrew Cheale of Cheale Meats to say his abattoir had been closed because of suspected swine fever? No, he wasn't, he says.

"I wasn't worried at all, because there was nothing wrong with my pigs," he says. "If a pig was lying down, you would check it to see what was wrong. If it's sick, it will either come right or lie there till it dies. My pigs were up and eating. I know they were OK."

On the Thursday, the ministry vet, Jim Dring, arrived, and at 10.30am on the Friday the answer came: his tests were positive.

That was not a good day, Waugh concedes with almost heroic understatement. For a start, there were photographers and reporters everywhere. Two of them arrived at 6.30am, four hours before the positive test came through, according to his neighbour Jimmy Brown. When he got home that night, they were outside the house. And there were ministry vets and officials everywhere, carrying out more tests on the pigs and preparing for the inevitable cull.

"The worst thing was the way the photographers kept putting their cameras in your face. When I got home, my sisters were going mad because of all the press and that. They'd been waiting for a phone call from the hospital to say when to bring my brother in, and the press were knocking on the door and all sorts. They tried to get into the hospital as well."

The next day, the cull started. By then the pigs were looking sick, Waugh says. A local slaughterman had been brought in to do the job.

"Dring said to me, 'It's an awful job, but it's got to be done.' There were sows lying on the path still kicking, and there were more climbing on top of them to be shot. I bought pigs to kill, but I didn't buy them to kill them like that," Waugh says. The pyre burned for two weeks.

"That was the worst part," he says. "When they first light it, it doesn't smell too bad, but after a couple of days it's just like meat roasting. But not just meat, because it's got guts and innards and everything in it." He pulls a face.

Even after that, he firmly believed he would be able to restock Burnside once it was cleaned up. The new Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, created after the general election in June, had other ideas. By September, talks over the clean-up operation had stalled. Waugh was taken to Sunderland Royal Hospital with chest pains, and even now is still waiting to see a heart specialist. Ronnie had undergone a major operation and was having chemotherapy. When the notice to quit came in October, it was almost a relief to just walk away.

Waugh has not been idle, though. He still works for Cheale Meats, buying in old sows and passing them on for slaughter and export. He still maintains that if he hadn't taken pigs to Cheale Meats that week in February 2001, the foot and mouth epidemic would still have happened but someone else would have been blamed. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, he says.

"From the start, they just tried to make it impossible for me. When I think back now, everything makes me think they just wanted a scapegoat. I think they wanted it to happen at Burnside."